Alien vision, however, might discern menaces we only see with devices like gas chromatographs and laser spectrometers.
If so, they might glimpse the sharp fluorescent signature of polyaro-matic hydrocarbons (PAHs). They might be astonished at how PAHs and dioxins, two substances emitted naturally by volcanoes and forest fires, suddenly leaped from background levels into center-stage chemical prominence in soil and crops as the decades advanced.
If they were carbon-based life-forms like us, they might leap themselves, or at least back away, because both PAHs and dioxins can be lethal to nervous systems and other organs. PAHs were buoyed into the 20th century aboard clouds of exhaust from automobiles and coal-fired power plants; they’re also in the pungent odor of fresh asphalt. At Rothamsted, as at farms everywhere, they were introduced deliberately, in herbicides and pesticides.

That concentration counters the anxiety she feels now, the pre-job jitters she hasn't experienced in a while.
She's here on Blue Ant's ticket. Relatively tiny in terms of permanent staff, globally distributed, more post-geographic than multinational, the agency has from the beginning billed itself as a high-speed, low-drag life-form in an advertising ecology of lumbering herbivores. Or perhaps as some non-carbon-based life-form, entirely sprung from the smooth and ironic brow of its founder, Hubertus Bigend, a nominal Belgian who looks like Tom Cruise on a diet of virgins' blood and truffled chocolates.
The only thing Cayce enjoys about Bigend is that he seems to have no sense at all that his name might seem ridiculous to anyone, ever. Otherwise, she would find him even more unbearable than she already does.
It's entirely personal, though at one remove.

Time will tell, but this is a problem that’s going to bite a lot of organizations in the rear if they don’t take action soon.
What Those Who Step In Look Like
You’re a candidate for stepping in if . . .
• You are a business or professional person first and an automation/technology expert second;
• You could be described as a “purple person”—bridging the gap between business or organizational need and technology capability;
• You’re good at interfacing with both silicon- and carbon-based life-forms;
• You’re not a full-time technologist, but you follow developments in IT and are not at all intimidated by it;
• You are willing to learn a lot about the logic of how an automated system works and a little about how it is programmed;
• You are willing to translate for other humans the specific decisions that an automated system makes;
• You are not now, nor have you ever been, a robot, android, automaton, avatar, or cyborg.

For example, he asked me, of the following four things, which contributes the most to the mass of a tree: air, water, soil, or sunlight? I said sunlight, because I thought of energy being transformed into mass. That’s a common answer, he said, and people also say soil a lot. But they’re both wrong. The right answer is air, because that’s where the carbon comes from, and trees, like people, are carbon-based life-forms. We’re mostly made up of the little carbon hexagons that the people in the MIT chemistry department scribble on their chalkboards.
Because people think air is light and soil is heavy, they think soil is the likely answer. But they’re wrong. There is a lot of carbon in the air. And when people learn what they thought is true is the opposite of true, they’re surprised—and they remember.

You figure that attacker is a dumb robot, and I am inclined to agree. You say there'll be a broadcast upload coming soon, and it'll be an Ultrabright: well, I guess maybe. But the rest of it --"
"You've got brains. Why don't you use them?" she snapped, finally giving rein to her anger at being taken by surprise. "Item! An Ultrabright attacker zaps every unshielded Expansion processor and carbon-based lifeform in the system. Item: Ultrabrights are worse than Superbrights for hogging dataflow. They need input or they go insane, like Anubis. So there's no Ultrabright on board that thing -- it's a dumb attack robot, a berserker. But here's another item: they need to occupy this system fast, unless they want it to be retaken by the Superbrights.
"So they must have beamed an Ultrabright out here before the attack began.

It is more than slightly interesting that this fact is clearly true, that it is rarely remarked upon, and that we have no particular theory for this expansion.” Four billion years ago, if you were a carbon atom, there were a few hundred molecular configurations you could stumble into. Today that same carbon atom, whose atomic properties haven’t changed one single nanogram, can help build a sperm whale or a giant redwood or an H1N1 virus, along with a near-infinite list of other carbon-based life forms that were not part of the adjacent possible of prebiotic earth. Add to that an equally formidable list of human concoctions that rely on carbon—every single object on the planet made of plastic, for instance—and you can see how far the kingdom of the adjacent possible has expanded since those fatty acids self-assembled into the first membrane.
The history of life and human culture, then, can be told as the story of a gradual but relentless probing of the adjacent possible, each new innovation opening up new paths to explore.

…

Coral reefs are sometimes called the “cities of the sea,” and part of the argument of this book is that we need to take the metaphor seriously: the reef ecosystem is so innovative in its exploitation of those nutrient-poor waters because it shares some defining characteristics with actual cities. In the language of complexity theory, these patterns of innovation and creativity are fractal: they reappear in recognizable form as you zoom in and out, from molecule to neuron to pixel to sidewalk. Whether you’re looking at the original innovations of carbon-based life, or the explosion of new software tools on the Web, the same shapes keep turning up. When life gets creative, it has a tendency to gravitate toward certain recurring patterns, whether those patterns are emergent and self-organizing, or whether they are deliberately crafted by human agents.
It may seem odd to talk about such different regions of experience as though they were interchangeable.

…

The answer, as it happens, is delightfully fractal: to make your mind more innovative, you have to place it inside environments that share that same network signature: networks of ideas or people that mimic the neural networks of a mind exploring the boundaries of the adjacent possible. Certain environments enhance the brain’s natural capacity to make new links of association. But these patterns of connection are much older than the human brain, older than neurons even. They take us back, once again, to the origin of life itself.
As far as we know, “carbon-based life” is a redundant expression: life would be impossible without the carbon atom. Most astrobiologists—scientists who study the possibility of life elsewhere in the universe—believe that if we are ever to discover convincing evidence of extraterrestrial life, be it on Mars or in some distant galaxy, it, too, will turn out to be carbon-based.
Why are we so confident about carbon’s essential role in creating living things?

The people who
have extensive knowledge of the enterprise processes, data, and metadata are leaving the enterprise through retirement or other reasons.
These individuals carry a vast amount of the corporation’s metadata in
their heads. One can consider these individuals to have metadata repositories in their “gray matter.” Thus, we often allude to the corporation’s
metadata repositories as being in carbon-based life forms that have legs
(and each is an isolated local repository). The enterprise can lose significant business metadata as individuals leave the enterprise unless they
establish a metadata repository.
✦ To aid staff members in understanding an enterprise business process
and the IT implementation of the process (for communications and
productivity).
5.2 Why Consolidate or Integrate Metadata?
81
✦ To look at metadata and information uniformly across the enterprise (for
consistency and quality).
✦ To understand the cross-functional business and technical implications
for change to an enterprise process or system (for reuse, the impact of
change and organization management).
✦ To come up with a rational plan for consolidating entire systems in the
enterprise (reuses and cost reduction).

…

(The real-world knowledge capture example used later in
this chapter is from this glossary project.)
6.3
The Corporate Knowledge Base
6.3.1
The Corporate Glossary: Beginning of a Knowledge Base
In Chapter 4, we discussed the importance of well-defined terminology and
standard vocabulary in an enterprise. The glossary is also a great place to
begin a knowledge capture initiative and to start encouraging businesspeople
to contribute their expertise.
6.3.2
What Is the Corporate Knowledge Base?
The Carbon-Based Life Form (i.e., human being) is the main repository of the
Corporate Knowledge Base, including business metadata. When each person
leaves the corporation, a piece of the metadata repository is leaving, and potentially critical corporate knowledge goes out the door with him or her.
What is the Corporate Knowledge Base? It is essentially everything the organization collectively knows that pertains to its business.

Probably also spitting a little. It was obnoxious because they kept replaying that hit and I kept yelling BOOM! louder with every replay.
Steve was yelling, too. Everyone else in the bar was hating us. We didn’t give a damn.
Later, I got my hands on the high-def footage of Taylor during and after that hit. He pops up, electrified. That fire. That heart. It’s something awesome when you watch a human—just another carbon-based life-form—doing what he does so well. And loving it.
That hit took all the air out of Cowboys Stadium, from the fans to the field. The Cowboys turned the ball over on downs, and Redskins players poured Gatorade on Coach Gibbs. Not a typical week-two celebration, but we thought it was appropriate.
Steve and I went home singing our fight song, and I had the joy of surprising my dad with the news the next morning.

Carbon sits at the center of life because it is gregarious and contains so many hooks for other elements to bind to. It has a particularly friendly relationship with oxygen. Carbon is easily oxidized as fuel for animals and easily unoxidized (reduced) by chlorophyll in plants. And of course it forms the backbone for long chains of incredibly diverse megamolecules. Silicon, carbon’s sister element, is the most likely alternative candidate to produce a non-carbon-based life form. Silicon also is very prolific in its hooking up with a variety of elements, and it is more abundant on the planet than carbon. When science-fiction authors dream up alternative life forms, they are often based on silicon. But in real life silicon suffers from a few major drawbacks. It does not link up into chains with hydrogen, limiting the size of its derivatives. Silicon-silicon bonds are not stable in water.

…

Without a liquid matrix it’s hard to imagine how complex molecules are transported around to interact. Perhaps silicon-based life inhabits a fiery world and the silicates are molten. Or perhaps the matrix is very cold liquid ammonia. But unlike ice, which floats and insulates the unfrozen liquid, frozen ammonia sinks, allowing the oceans to freeze whole. These concerns are not hypothetical but are based on experiments to produce alternatives to carbon-based life. So far, all evidence points to DNA as the “perfect” molecule.
For even though clever minds like ours may invent a new life base, finding a life base that can create itself is an entirely higher order. A potential synthetic life base created in the lab might be robust enough to survive on its own in the wild but fail to organize itself into existence. If you can skip the need for a self-made birth, you can jump to all kinds of complex systems that would never evolve on their own.

…

This kind of engineered gardening might explain a lot, but it does not remove the uniqueness of DNA. Nor does it remove the channels that DNA has laid for evolution on Earth.
The constraints of physics, chemistry, and geometry have governed life from its origins onward—and even into the technium. “Underlying all the diversity of life is a finite set of natural forms that will recur over and over again anywhere in the cosmos where there is carbon-based life,” claim biochemists Michael Denton and Craig Marshall. Evolution simply cannot make all possible proteins, all possible light-gathering molecules, all possible appendages, all possible means of locomotion, all possible shapes. Life, rather than being boundless and unlimited in every direction, is bounded and limited in many directions by the nature of matter itself.
I will argue that the same constraints bind technology.

Officials say the animal, an adult bull moose, wandered in through an open loading-dock door and interrupted council business for nearly an hour as animal-control workers untangled the antlers from a string of seasonal holiday lights. “I’m a devoted hunter, and I can say I’ve never seen antlers that big,” said Councilman Thomas Ross. “Those were some major antlers.”
Scientists have determined that antlers are a result of an imperceptibly incremental evolutionary adaptation over the course of millions of years, a process that began with one single-celled carbon-based life form which traces its own origin to an infinitely small dot of arguably infinite energy that exploded 13.7 billion years ago due to reasons that are thought to be best understood by a man in a wheelchair who speaks through a computerized voice box (see Regular News).
World’s Largest Tomato to Become Tomato Sauce
NAPOLI, ITALY—A tomato declared by Guinness World Records to be the world’s largest tomato will now become tomato sauce, says the farmer who grew it.

In a tightly knit society such as Japan, these media have an inestimable power to glamorize and influence attitudes to robots and technology in general.
And then there are the industrial robot fairs. In September of 1985 the 15th International Symposium on Industrial Robots (ISIR) was held in Tokyo, and it was accompanied, as usual, by an exposition at Harumi pier, east of the city. In front of the huge halls, a billboard-sized painting of the ultimate cliche in industrial robot art, a metal hand reaching out to touch a carbon-based life form (a butterfly, in this case), announced the robots inside.
In concept this show was nearly identical to those held annually in the United States. But the Japanese version differed dramatically in several important ways. It was sponsored not only by the Japan Industrial Robot Association but also by the Daily Industrial News. Inside the jam-packed halls, the latest hydraulic, electric, and vision-equipped direct-drive robots solved puzzles, assembled electronic circuitry, and pretended to weld and paint car bodies, while manufacturers' representatives hyped their merits.

CHAPTER 25
Darkness, CTzu 53/Year 1 [The Future]
Let me out, please...
His name was also Chuang Tzu. So said the butterfly.
Obviously enough, this was not Zaq's original name because that had been given up during the ceremony of rebirth. The fifty-third Chuang Tzu wore the very first on his cloak as a diamond buckle. Every emperor became a diamond eventually. It was one of the few advantages of living as a carbon-based life form.
All that was needed was death, cremation at fifteen hundred degrees and enough pressure to replicate geophysical forces found in the transmutation of soft carbon to intricate lattice.
There was a circular elegance to this solution which appealed to the Library on several levels, although it could explain its thoughts to Zaq on only three, the others being beyond the understanding of a small child.

…

There was a distinction between the types of data, their containers and the ripped container within which they all floated. So the darkness began with the most dense of the data hordes, examining the SZ Loyal Prince and its semiAI, running millions of routines in an attempt to understand its origins.
A type II star, a sequence of nine planets (actually seven, as two did not rate that definition or, if they did, so did others not included in the nine), carbon-based life, relatively new, technologically simple. The darkness trawled opera from Peking, Rodin's Kiss, music by Brahms, the pyramids and Sphinx, the Great Wall of China and a painting of a soup can without understanding what any of them might be (or that they were carried under protest from Beijing, their mix chosen to reflect global levels of culture).
In the beginning there was darkness. A cold curiosity that waited for meaning, tasting numbers and extracting data from the chaos of eighteen hundred dead refugees, one rotting Colonel Commissar, a doctor frozen at the point of dying and a mind being slowly reclaimed from hibernation.

In this spirit, some researchers have wired professional traders to measure skin resistance, EEG patterns, and pulse rates, in search of the biological imperative behind a “buy” order. And there is computer-intensive finance. Wall Street has long been the computer industry’s biggest customer, unleashing “genetic algorithms,” “neural networks,” and other computational techniques on the market in hopes that silicon intelligence can find profitable patterns where carbon-based life forms cannot.
This “post-modern” finance has yet to yield real success. Nobody has hit the jackpot.
A Game of Chance
So, as Lenin’s revolutionary manifesto put it: What is to be done?
As preparation, play a game.
On the facing page you see four price charts of the kind you would find in a brokerage-house report, but with the identifying dates and values removed. Two of the charts are real chronicles of the price of a real financial instrument—name also removed.

Konarka’s technology uses molecules of ‘organic conductive polymers,’ jointly discovered by the company’s co-founder Alan Heeger, along with Alan MacDiarmid and Hideki Shirakawa (a discovery for which the three shared the 2000 Nobel Prize for Chemistry). The ‘organic’ label refers to the fact that the polymers in question are partly carbon. Because carbon is such a versatile atom (it will form all sorts of chemical bonds), it’s the one nature prefers as the key building block for living things, which is why aliens in sci-fi movies of the seventies like to refer to humans as ‘carbon-based life forms’ (it’s the first thing their scanners pick up). It’s not just us, though. All plants and animals are carbon based. This is why chemistry involving carbon is often referred to as ‘organic’ chemistry.
Like the two types of doped silicon used in traditional solar cells, conductive polymer molecules can be either ‘positive’ or ‘negative.’ Like the phosphorous and boron-doped wafers in silicon cells, one set of polymer molecules gives up electrons and the other collects them.

Excited nuclei can possess only very particular masses, and scientists cannot simply wish that they have a convenient value. Fortunately, Hoyle was more than just a wishful thinker. His confidence in the existence of just the right excited state of carbon was based on a strange but valid chain of logical reasoning.
Hoyle’s premise was that he existed in the universe. Furthermore, he pointed out, he was a carbon-based life form. Therefore carbon existed in the universe, so there must have been a way of creating carbon. However, the only way to create carbon seemed to rely on the existence of a specific excited state of carbon. Consequently, such an excited state must exist. Hoyle was rigorously applying what would later become known as the anthropic principle. This principle can be defined and interpreted in various ways, but one version states:
We are here to study the universe, so the laws of the universe must be compatible with our own existence.

Some quantities—like the mass of the Higgs particle and the value of the dark energy that controls cosmic acceleration—are much lower than physicists expected. They’re dismayed that laws of nature seem to be an arbitrary and messy outcome of random fluctuations in the fabric of space-time.13
A controversial argument deriving from fine-tuning is the fact that the forces of nature and the attributes of the universe appear to take values required for carbon-based life to exist. If the electromagnetic force was stronger or weaker, stable atoms could not form. If the strong nuclear force was stronger or weaker, carbon couldn’t be created in stars. If the gravitational constant was stronger, stars would be very short-lived; if it was weaker, stars wouldn’t shine or make the heavy elements. The universe also has very low entropy or disorder, which may be responsible for time’s forward sense or “arrow.”

Maybe the name itself was preposterous and its pursuit, in any case, something that people shouldn't undertake. Maybe in promoting the metaphorical relationship between people and machines, cybernetics tended to cheapen and corrupt human perceptions of human intelligence. Or perhaps this science promised to advance the intelligence of people as well as of machines and to imbue the species with a new, exciting power.
"Silicon-based life would have a lot of advantages over carbon- based life," a young engineer told me once. He said he believed in a time when the machines would "take over." He snapped his fingers and said, "Just like that." He seemed immensely pleased with that thought. To me, though, the prospects for truly intelligent computers looked comfortably dim.
To some the crucial issue was privacy. In theory, computers should be able to manage, more efficiently than people, huge amounts of a society's information.

Among other places, you find it in the water molecule, H2O. Next most common in the universe is helium: chemically inert, and thus not useful to the human body. Inhaling it makes a good party trick, but it’s not chemically useful to life. Next on the cosmic list is oxygen; next in the human body and all life on Earth is oxygen. Carbon comes next in the universe; carbon comes next in life. It’s a hugely fertile element. We ourselves are carbon-based life. Next in the universe? Nitrogen. Next in life on Earth? Nitrogen. It all matches one for one. If we were made of an isotope of bismuth, you’d have an argument that we’re something unique in the cosmos, because that would be a really rare thing to be made of. But we’re not. We’re made of the commonest ingredients. And that gives me a sense of belonging to the universe, a sense of participation.

I think one copy for the backup archive in the icy depths, one to go exploring – and one to settle down and raise a family. What about you?"
"You'll go all three ways?" she asks.
"Yes, I think so. What about you?"
"Where you go, I go." She leans against him. "Isn't that what matters in the end?" she murmurs.
Chapter 3
Survivor
This time, more than a double handful of years passes between successive visits to the Macx dynasty.
Somewhere in the gas-sprinkled darkness beyond the local void, carbon-based life stirs. A cylinder of diamond fifty kilometers long spins in the darkness, its surface etched with strange quantum wells that emulate exotic atoms not found in any periodic table that Mendeleyev would have recognized. Within it, walls hold kilotonnes of oxygen and nitrogen gas, megatonnes of life-infested soil. A hundred trillion kilometers from the wreckage of Earth, the cylinder glitters like a gem in the darkness.

Silicon and oxygen, forged from helium and hydrogen in the atomic furnaces of stars, have lingered as the two most common elements in the outer layer of the planet we call home. One atom of silicon combines with two atoms of oxygen to produce silicon dioxide, or silica, which makes up 59 percent of the thin, floating crust—a silica wafer—that is solid ground to us. Silica, in one form or another, is the principal ingredient of 95 percent of the rock beneath our feet.
Exobiologists consider silicon a possible platform for extraterrestrial life. On our planet, carbon-based life came first, although, according to the theories of A. G. Cairns-Smith, siliceous clays may have given our genetic system its start. Self-reproducing clay crystals may have served as a template for the beginnings of organic life, just as organic life is now serving as a substrate for the proliferation of self-reproducing forms of silicon and their associated code. But the development of silicon-based cyberplasm, governing the course of organic life, does not mean that carbon-based metabolism will be superseded or replaced.

How could it be known in advance by any self-replicating constructor that life was possible? In the absence of DNA molecules or other physical memory, where was the ur-information for life encoded and stored? We simply cannot answer this. Unless of course we accept a Platonic perspective and place blind faith in universal forms that exist outside a material universe. Unless we believe that there is a mathematical blueprint for carbon-based life in the metaphysical archives of universal forms.
However, if, like me, you are not quite content with Platonic metaphysics, then we must consider another explanation for life: that complex automata (e.g. bacteria, animals, humans) can arise from very simple automata (e.g. autocatalytic chemical reactions). We must conjecture that complexity must arise from simplicity, and that the wonderful intricacy we observe in nature, from the very small to the very large, in structure as well as in function, has extremely humble and simple origins.

See also Steven Weinberg, "A Designer Universe?" at http://www.physlink.coml Education/ essay_weinberg.cfm.
8. According to some cosmological theories, there were multiple big bangs, not one, leading to multiple universes (parallel multiverses or "bubbles"). Different physical constants and forces apply in the different bubbles; conditions in some (or at least one) of these bubbles support carbon-based life. See Max Tegmark, "Parallel Universes," Scientific American (May 2003): 41–53; Martin Rees, "Exploring Our Universe and Others," Scientific American (December 1999): 78–83; Andrei Linde, "The Self-Reproducing Inflationary Universe," Scientific American (November 1994): 48–55.
9. The "many worlds" or multiverse theory as an interpretation of quantum mechanics was developed to solve a problem presented by quantum mechanics and then has been combined with the anthropic principle.

As robotics and cloud hardware of all scales blend into a common category of machine, it will be unclear for everyday human-robotic interaction whether one is encountering a fully autonomous, partially autonomous, or completely human-piloted synthetic intelligence. Everyday interactions replay the Turing test over and over. Is there a person behind this machine, and if so how much? In time, the answer will matter less, and the postulation of human (or even carbon-based life) as the threshold measure of intelligence and as the qualifying gauge of a political ethics may seem like tasteless vestigial racism, replaced by less anthropocentric frames of reference. The position of the User then maps only very incompletely onto any one individual body. From the perspective of the platform, what looks like one is really many, and what looks like many may only be one. Elaborate schizophrenias already take hold in our early negotiation of these composite User positions.

During that time, their only major discovery was the planets inside the barrier. Tunde confirmed that gravitational readings showed two gas giants and three small solid planets were orbiting the star, with indications of several large asteroids. It livened up the daily department heads meeting when he told them that one of the solid worlds was within the life band, the distance from the star that would allow carbon-based life to evolve should the planetary conditions be favorable, such as the availability of water and a decent atmospheric pressure.
Finally, for morale’s sake rather than practical science, Wilson allowed McClain Gilbert to fly out to the surface. After the long, boring flight, the crew was becoming restless. Like Wilson, they’d all expected something a little more substantial, some hint as to the origin of the barrier, the reason behind it.